Play This Game, You Must

So while I'm getting some hardware together and turning my laptop into my new Simming machine (seeing as my laptop still runs Windows 7, while this desktop has been consumed by a broken copy of Windows 10 which hates TS2 and stops all attempts to run it), I have to play something in the meantime. So I've been playing plenty of Neverwinter Nights multiplayer (the old school Diamond Edition, not Beamdog's Enhanced Edition...which I am planning to buy next January, seeing as all of my favorite servers are converting to the EE next year...).

But Neverwinter Nights costs ten or twenty dollars (USD), so you might not be interested in that.

I've also been dusting off my old 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons campaign over on Illusion Vale and donning the Dungeon Master hat again. But that's dice-slinging Alpha Nerd stuff, so you might not be interested in that neither.

"So Pizzatron! What have you been playing lately, video-game-wise, on the internet, for free?"

Well, how about Capoeira Fighter 3?

It's a really fun Flash game. The graphics are solid, the animation's fluid (with blur effects added for really fast movements), the challenge is adjustable for a broad range of skill levels, the music's engaging (with actual roda music for any capoerista's stage, and about half of the 29 fighters there are capoeristas)...

...and there are plenty of game modes to keep players engaged, including Arcade Mode (aka. Story Mode), Versus battles with up to four players, six Mini-Games and six Survival modes.

Matches can be 2-on-2, 1-on-2, 2-on-1 or 1-on-1. If you're playing with two fighters, simply tap Down twice to switch fighters; this gives one fighter a chance to rest on the sidelines while his or her partner fights in his place. With one fighter, you don't have the option to tag out, but your fighter gains more health and damage resistance, plus his/her Stamina drains more slowly and recovers more quickly, compensating for having to fight two people instead of just one.

Scott Stoddard — the game's creator and leading developer — went the extra mile and consulted various martial arts schools and martial artists in order to ensure accurate depictions of their styles. But that measure wasn't as necessary with Capoeira; in addition to his talents as a game coder and developer, Stoddard himself is trained in Capoeira.

Yes, that's his YouTube channel. He's not really checking in on it these days, but it's there. His earlier videos also include videos of Capoeira Fighter 3 as it progressed through development, if anyone cares to look them up.

Okay, so he probably wasn't a Mestre-rank capoeirista at the time of that video's uploading, but hey, I myself never made it above Nanakyu/7th Kyu rank when I trained in Shotokan Karate. But being a mere Purple Belt didn't stop me from studying up on the history of Karate and its various schools, substyles and philosophies to the point where I could tell real Karate from Hollywood bullpucky at a glance, right?

And like I said, about half of the fighters in this game are Capoeira stylists, true to the game's name. The rest are a mix of Karate stylists (or "karatekas" to those of us versed in the martial arts...), Kung Fu stylists, Taekwondo stylists, Muay Thai stylists, Jeet Kun Do stylists, Jiujitsu stylists, boxers, whatever the heck those two aliens practice...all in all, one or two fighters for each of those non-Capoeira styles.

But even with so many capoeiristas in the game, each of them has enough variations in size, strength, stamina, agility, attack forms and defense forms to distinguish Capoeirista A from Capoeirista B. Thus does Capoeira Fighter 3 avoid the "Ken and Ryu" syndrome which plagued Street Fighter II: Same fighter, different looks. Even though they all perform the Ginga and other core traits of Capoeira, different capoeiristas do different things, so stay on your toes.

At any point during a match, just mash the Spacebar to pause the game and bring up the moves lists for both active fighters.

I like the game's Story Mode. It gives you a feel for who's whom, what they're like, why they're fighting and whether they're heroes, villains or something in between. You get a cutscene at the beginning, a cutscene in the middle (when you have to make a crucial choice) and an ending.

At several points throughout Story Mode play, you'll receive a chance to improve on one of your fighter's stats: Offense (which improves the damage that your attacks deal), Stamina (which improves your Stamina recovery), Defense (which reduces what damage you take from opponents' attacks) and Hyper (which improves the rate at which your Hyper gauge fills, so you can execute the dreaded Hyper attacks sooner and more often). Pick whatever suits your playing style best.

Here's one of those "choose your path" junctions that I was just talking about.

If you pick Maionese (the goofy capoeirista in the blue and white), you start off with Furacao (the crazy-looking bald capoeirista in the black and orange) as your tag team partner. Halfway through, you have to make a choice: Either let Furacao wander off to help defend their school from enemies while Maionese continues on alone, or insist that Furacao stick with Maionese (and let the other students fend for themselves).

Each fighter in the game can reach one of two endings; your choice impacts whom you fight from there, what difficulties you'll face and which ending you get.

Fun fact: Because Scott Stoddard has a self-deprecating sense of humor, he created Maionese as an analog of himself in CF3! Maionese is a bit whiny, he's a goofball, he's a huge fan of disc golf (as seen in the ending where he asks Furacao to stay with him) and good Goddess, he's wearing flip-flops! All the other capoeristas in the game have the good sense to fight barefoot (except for Santo and his combat boots, but Santo's a paramilitary guy, so that's to be expected), and for men, flip-flops are almost certainly the worst footwear to wear to a fight! (For women, flip-flops rank right behind high-heeled shoes in the "Wear these and get stomped" category. Kick 'em off!)

And yet, no matter how Maionese kicks, jumps or cartwheels, his flip-flops never come flying off! How does he do it? Is super glue involved? How does one remove dried-on super glue from the soles of one's feet, anyway?

That "tagging out" feature. Maionese was running low on Stamina after a really wicked combo, so I switched to Furacao, who proceeded to kick Perereca right upside her midgetty little head while Maionese took a breather on the sidelines.

The green bar below your health bar is your Stamina. You lose Stamina with every attack you throw and regain it when you're not attacking. The less Stamina you have, the weaker your attacks are. Thus does CF3 punish button-mashers. If you want to win, pace your attacks and make them count!

Hyper attacks can make or break a round with vicious combos and hefty damage, so use them wisely!

When you select your fighter at the beginning of the game, you can pick one of several Hyper Powers to go with each Hyper, such as Shield (drastically reduced damage from enemy attacks while the Hyper is live), Damage (+50% damage to all your attacks), Healing (recover some of your lost health), Ghost (temporary invisibility), Venom (further erodes your opponent's health) and more. During your Hypers, your fighter's afterimages are colored to correspond to which Power you chose: cyan for Healing, blue for Shield, red for Damage, et cetera.

I like the special effects when you land a knock-out blow: Everything goes in slow motion for a second or two, and the background stretches out and goes all streaky.

It's like you just knocked out the space-time continuum along with your opponent!

(That teal-and-yellow blur is Cobra finishing Santo off with one of her special attacks: a flying reverse kick. See? Fast = blurry!)

A winner is you!

(More to come, but I have to go to traffic court in the morning. See you tomorrow!)

Yeah, sure...18 is a bit more than half of 29. But hey, the game's named "Capoeira Fighter" for a reason.

Aren't martial arts great?

Okay, now that that's off my chest....

I may have told a little lie back there when I said that every fighter has his or her own two unique endings. Saryn and Arubim — the two space aliens — are a couple of exceptions to that norm.

(Another Fun Fact: Saryn and Arubim first appeared in Guardians of Altarris: The Sinless Blade, a side-scrolling beat-em-up with Saryn and Arubim as heroes defending their homeworld from an invading interstellar force. Guardians of Altarris was also created and developed by Scott Stoddard, so these two appear in CF3 as a callback of sorts.)

Guardians looks fun. I should hunt it down and try it sometime.

Supposedly, these two practice the same martial art. But while Arubim's burly attacks and defenses harken to those of Freestyle Wrestling (complete with a drop kick, a command-throw Power Bomb and a Zangief-style spinning clothesline)...

...Saryn's maneuvers are more agile and acrobatic, suggesting more of a Kung Fu or Kickboxing influence.

Reija must be a very flexible fighting style. I bet its fundamentals are a seething mess.

I can't really follow their story because they don't even speak! TV Tropes calls their language "starfish language" and suggests that their words should be appearing as a bunch of weird squiggles and arcane glyphs here, but all I see are blanks. Maybe their species communicates telepathically. Who knows? They're extraterrestrials!

So anyway, these two are a package deal. If you pick one, you'll always get the other as your tag team partner. It's when they reach that choice junction that you can send your chosen one on his or her separate way...unless you decide that Saryn and Arubim are too good of a team to break apart, of course.

So then you get into another fight...

...or two.

After that, if you kept Saryn and Arubim together, then they get to fight a final boss together.

But if you broke them up, then your former tag team partner comes back...as your penultimate opponent.

But you didn't make it this far by being a chump, right?

After that, you get the dreaded Mirror Match, and your own fighter as the final boss!

But hey, you should be a 10th Degree Grandmaster of Reija by now! You can do it!

But then, no matter which of the two you picked for your lead fighter, and no matter whether you chose to split them up or keep them together...you get the same ending for all four paths. Apparently Saryn and Arubim had so much fun coming to Earth and beating up a bunch of humans that they decided to stick around and sample some of Earth's most exquisite cuisine.

Nice review! Sounds like fun. I've been playing "The Long Dark" for the last couple of weeks.

You're a Bush Pilot that has crashed in the wilderness in Northern Canada, due to some weird sort of EMP event.
Your goal is to survive the Canadian winter, for as long as possible.
You only have a small amount of gear with you. You have to scavenge old cabins, and the woods for supplies. You are apparently the ONLY person who's survived this event. There are lots of dead bodies to search for supplies.

You have to learn how to make fire.
You have to learn how to repair your clothing.
You have to find MANY things to survive for any amount of time. You have to be really resourceful, and patient.
You have to find a knife, hatchet, and an Enfield rifle, and ammo for hunting.
You learn how to make a survival bow, and arrows.
Sterilize water.
Find decent shelter.
Cook food.
Make fishing gear, and fish.
Wolves will kill you, Bears will kill you, and Moose will stomp you to smithereens and kill you.
You can fall off a cliff and die, you can fall through the ice, and freeze to death. Pretty realistic game, considering you need to survive as long as you can. The game technically doesn't end, until you die. I had a character that lived for 126 days, and fell off a log crossing a ravine, and plummeted to her death. NO DO OVERS! When you're dead, you're dead.
Challenging, even on the "easy" settings!

Cool artwork!

I won't give any more details, so as not to spoil it for anyone.

Replay value, is as good as Sims 2!

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED! Worth the purchase price from Steam!

For DECENT game play (medium high, and high settings), recommended set up is:

If you're an absolute noob at CF3 and you want to learn to play without getting your butt kicked repeatedly, my advice is to start off with Aleron. As he's a boxing English midget short guy, his two Kick buttons don't work (except for scooting him forward or backward by a tiny bit), but what he does with his punches, he does very well indeed! So that's only 50% of the normal attack buttons for you to fuss with, right?

His arms actually seem to stretch and balloon out a bit for his special attacks, which include a dashing cross, a "tenderizer" punch combination to his opponent's midsection and a one-two pair of uppercuts capable of propelling the opponent into the air, setting him or her up for an air juggle (which Aleron can execute quite handily).

Naturally, his Hyper attacks include even more punches.

Aleron may be a one-trick pony, but it's one hell of a trick.

He's also very sensitive about his less-than-impressive height, which is how Cobra provokes him into entering the tournament: She claims that she's inviting Aleron on behalf of Mestre Loka, then proceeds to toss out subtle "short" insults until Aleron indignantly agrees to join the tourney, just to humble Loka with a smackdown. But if you play through Cobra's story and those of a few other fighters, you'll learn that Cobra's actually in allegiance with Mestre Zumbi, who's enemies with Loka. So read between the lines and it becomes clear that Cobra's manipulating Aleron into doing her dirty work and taking Loka down a peg on Zumbi's behalf.

You would think that a mere fighting game wouldn't have multiple interwoven stories and intrigue to aid its replay value. And you would be wrong.

He gets his own story too, of course. Either he stays the course, beat's Loka's school and wins the tournament alone...

(...in which case, he gets knighted by the Crown, opens his own gym and kicks off a few lines of athletic products...)

...or he nobly abandons his quest for the championship and helps Pantera stop Coelha's corporation from digging up the rain forest...

(...in which case, he becomes another rain forest defender and moves into the jungle with her, and she admires his muscles and his moustache and...I dunno, they get married or something.)

But of the entire roster, my absolute favorite fighter in this game is, without a doubt, Jimmy Zappa.

Maybe it's because he's the one Karate stylist in the game, and I'm an old karateka myself.

Maybe it's because, while his basic stance, movements, attacks and defenses are Karate-like, two of his special moves are borrowed from Ken and Ryu of Street Fighter fame, so many veteran fighting-game gamers can pull them off by heart (and chain them into some truly harrowing combos).

...nah, it's probably because he's one big, shameless homage! Just look at the big Jimmy Zappa picture! Look at his yellow-and-black sleeveless gi, his one special move which is quite patently named "Sweep the Leg", the cutscenes involving him losing his girlfriend Ali to another karateka followed by his browbeating sensei making him recite their dojo's very familiar motto, the name "Jimmy Zappa" being somewhat similar to that of one "Billy Zabka," the arena in which Jimmy fights, the background characters in that stage, and the music for that stage, all reminiscent of a certain climactic scene from a certain landmark martial arts movie from the 80's...

...and Capoeira Fighter 3 might as well be grabbing you by the collar and screaming "You're playing Johnny Lawrence from The Karate Kid!!!"

Delicious.

Oh, yeah...I'm still playing Neverwinter Nights Diamond Edition, Multiplayer, on the Savage Frontier and Surrounds server/persistent world, set in D&D's Forgotten Realms setting. I took my Wizard for a walk last night...

...and after blasting a bunch of hyena people ("gnolls" to the initiated) to smithereens, she finally reached Level 14 today.

I opted to pick two more 7th Level spells to add to her spellbook. Tempting as Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion would be (because who wouldn't want to be able to walk into an extradimensional palace and rest up while they're stuck in the middle of nowhere?), I decided that it would be most prudent to pick one offensive spell and one defensive spell. So Prismatic Spray and Spell Mantle made the cut.

I used to love Street fighter 2 back in the day, so that fighter looks fun. Currently I am playing about with Oxygen Not Included from klei. That's the same company that brought us Don't Starve, which is the most unforgiving game I have ever played.

ONI is great fun, it isn't free, but I got it as a Christmas gift, so it was free to me. ONI page on steam

With a name like "Oxygen Not Included," you just know that I'm going to ask for the details about your experiences with the game and what it's all about, right?

Also:

1) Which Street Fighter II character(s) did you play back in the day?
2) As an old Zangief player myself, did you love Zangief or hate him?
3) Have you tried Capoeira Fighter 3 yet?

I really should get back on Steam some time. I wonder how many of my old buddies from the City of [Heroes/Villains] community are still around, plus I haven't played Alien Swarm in a dog's age. Playing the squad's Techie (usually Vegas, sometimes Crash) was fun, what with setting up sentry turrets, cracking security interfaces and welding doors behind us so we wouldn't get torn to pieces by any xenos attacking us from behind. Magicka was a riot too; how many bosses did I one-shot or two-shot with a well-placed Earth+Ice+Earth+Ice+Earth+Ice+Earth+Ice+Earth+Ice spell? That spell is devastating!

So the whole premise of this fighting game is that you get to pick one of six Biblical figures (Eve, Noah, Moses, Mary, Satan and Jesus) and send him or her to whomp everyone else. The controls are a bit too simple for my tastes (jump, kick, jump, guard, left and right, and three special moves per character); I mean, it's definitely a far cry short of the complexity and stylishness of Capoeira Fighter 3. But simplicity does spare you a great deal of frustration when you're learning a new fighting game.

There's a Practice Mode and a Tournament Mode. The Practice mode lets you fiddle with a fighter while dueling a CPU opponent of your choosing.

"Ye are not yet worthy". Yeah, that's a secret character you can unlock later on. It's hard to say, but given that there are six standard fighters, and seven stages in Practice Mode, each of the first six stages correspond to a standard fighter (The Garden of Eden = Eve / Noah's Ark = Noah / The Parted Seas = Moses / The Manger = Mary / Hell = Satan / Golgotha = Jesus) and the seventh stage does not (Heaven = ???), and that stage blatantly features three big thrones, it might not be all that difficult to guess who the unlockable mystery fighter is.

(HAR HAR, they made Noah look like a crusty old sailor. Nice tats, Noah! )

Unfortunately, there are no mirror matches in Bible Fight, so you can't pit Moses against Moses and learn how to play Moses by copying the CPU's moves. The good news is that Practice Mode also gives you a nice, pretty list of your chosen character's moves, so you can practice them till your heart's content. And you can click on the little C clickie in the lower right corner of the screen to bring up a mini maneuver menu at any time during a match.

(Yes, I know. The rosary was purely a Catholic invention, and the Virgin Mary probably wouldn't have had one. I get that. )

Also, Mary got ripped off. Each of the other fighters gets a big, nasty attack for their "Super Special", but all Mary gets is a measly teleport that you can see coming a mile away. With a name like "Immaculate Deception," you would think it would be something like 'one Mary goes up, three Maries come down and you have 0.25 seconds to guess which one's the real Mary and punt her into orbit,' but no. So if you're alert and quick about it, you can prepare a nice Super Special of your own to slam her with the moment her feet touch the ground.

But let's face it: Practice Mode is all well and good, but the real game is the Tournament Mode. Let's get cracking on that, shall we?

One of my (admittedly kinda petty) complaints here is that there are oodles of figures in the Bible to work with, so six or seven fighters seems like a pretty small selection. I would have liked to see some more Biblical bad guys in the cast of fighters, like Cain, Pharaoh Ramses, Jezebel and/or Ahab, Goliath, Saul, Herod, Judas Iscariot, Pontius Pilate or Babylon the Great (with or without epic superdragon mount, because dragons are sporkin' awesome). Samson could have been another big heavy-hitter, Joseph could have had a ton of tricks in that fancy cloak of his, and Job could have been the high-endurance guy who gets the snot kicked out of him and keeps getting back up to take another swing at you. And then there's the archangel Michael, and Shadrach (complete with fire attacks), and any one of the Four Horsemen (with the other three incorporated into special attacks), and so on.

So anyway, because naked women are awesome — and because I'm perfectly secure in my masculinity — I decided to play through the game as Eve.

Yeah, she's pretty cute for being a relatively simple drawing. She also has some nice moves. Her standing kick is a flipover kick which is handy for knocking jump-kickers out of the air, she has a snake whip attack which is fast with a nice range, you can chain her jump kick and standing kick together for a handy two-hit combo, and if the other guy likes to stand still, punish them with Eve's Super, where she summons Adam to bust up out of the ground with an uppercut to the other guy's gonads. And his fig leaf somehow manages to stay perfectly intact while he's doing it.

Ah, Adam punching Moses in the jaw...something you'll never see in the Bible, that's for sure.

Biblical girlfight!

Awww, I made Baby Jesus cry.

I like this game, but another complaint of mine is that it's always the same progression: Eve -> Noah -> Moses -> Mary -> Satan -> Jesus, minus whichever one you're playing. The game never tries to mix it up and adjust the difficulty for each CPU fighter's rank. Eve or Noah will always be the first person you fight, and she or he will always be wuss-on-a-stick lousy. And Satan or Jesus will always be the last guy you fight (...or will he?), so naturally Satan and Jesus will always fight like they could take on a dozen Bruce Lee clones at the same time and win.

And oh, crap in a hat, is that ever the truth....

As you could safely expect, Satan is a cheaty cheesemaster summabutch. His favorite battle tactic is spamming his Super and turning into Cerberus and bullrushing you over and over and over and over and over and over, with the occasional fireball, tail whip or trident stab to break the monotony.

Expect to see this a friggin' lot.

Expect to see this a lot, too. *big, long, weary sigh*

(Yes, I know. The pentacle is European Pagan in origin, not Judeo-Christian. The Church hijacked it and used it to demonize the local indigenous Pagan sects during Catholicism's spread throughout Europe during the Dark Ages. Now shush. )

So this all became frustrating in short order. Will the First Woman (...Second if you count Lilith, and whatever-the-heck if you don't subscribe to the Abrahamic religions at all...) ever lay a frickin' righteous smackdown on the blasted blinkin' codswallowin' rotten Damnit-Janet cheap-butt blustard Prince of Darkness, or so help me Zeus I'm gonna rip up this keyboard and hurl it across the farkin' room?

Sporking hell, I bloody dadgummed well hope so.

Yes!YES!!! In your face, Satan! In your face! WAH HAHAHAHAHA!!!

How did I do it? Tit-for-tat, that's how I did it. Satan wouldn't stop laying it on thick with his Cerberus, so I beat him to the punch, spammed a whole buttload of Muddy Uppercuts together and just had Adam beat the tar out of Satan from long range. The good news about Satan is that he's big and slow, therefore he's easy meat for a certain naked guy bursting out of the ground and uppercutting him repeatedly. The rest of the fighters have some capacity for getting out of the way before Adam lunges up and smacks them, but not chunky ole Satan.

(...unless he's spamming his Cerberus attack, maybe.)

So there's that. Who's next now?

Awwwwwwwwwww shazbot....

I strongly suspected that Eve was about to get her shapely buttocks handed right back to her. I suspected right.

The Battle for Golgotha
Eve "The First Lady" of Eden versus Jesus "The Redeemer" of Nazareth
Round 1 of However Long It Takes To Beat This Guy

Is Eve's head small or is Jesus' head big? I think Jesus' head is big.

Maybe it's just the beard. Beards add about five pounds to a man's head, right?

(And if we postpone the kick-off for ten minutes, could you two run out and find some actual clothes to wear to this fight? Sheesh.)

*whiff!*

Take that!

Jesus' Kung Fu is strong.

I don't know what Eve's fighting style is, but she was probably the one who invented it.

She's her own sensei like that.

Ow.

Jesus, you and your friggin' Loaves and Fishes super attack....

Yes, I got to see this plenty of times, too.

From the dust we came. Into the dust we drool, bleed, piddle and cough up bloody phlegm after we get our butts crunched.

It was awfully nice of the Romans to give Jesus an endless supply of crosses to break over people's heads, wasn't it?

You know, Eve does have a pretty cute hiney, doesn't she? She has the little dimples over it and everything!

That's more like it!

(Apologies for the merciless corner trap, Jesus.)

You're sure you'd rather not feed the multitudes with all that bread and fish, rather than trying to rain the pain down on me like that?

Adam gets a lucky shot in.

Finally!

Unlike the fight with Satan, the fight with Jesus was actually fun. Sure, Jesus was tough...about as tough as Satan was. But the crucial difference? Satan was tough to beat because he's a cheap, spam-happy buzzard with that Cerberus Charge and an overall can't-get-close-enough-to-hit-him-without-getting-flattened combination of strength and reach. Jesus, on the other hand, is tough because he's got moves. He's a very kinetic fighter, he seems to have the most evolved and fine-tuned AI of the bunch, he seems to know when to hang back and when to close in...it's the closest thing this game has to playing against another person. (And before you ask, no, Bible Fight has no two-player mode. Lucky you, because my homegirl Eve and I would complete spank your candy apples.... )

Sure, Jesus uses his Loaves and Fishes a lot, but it's far, far less than Satan uses his Cerberus Charge. Spamming Adam didn't help much; Jesus is too fast. And he hits hard. Cheese will not fare well against him (with two possible exceptions: he seemed very vulnerable to Eve's jump kick/standing kick/Snake Whip combo, and slow but repeated standing punches do pretty well at keeping Jesus in a corner trap). So even though Jesus knocked Eve out about as much as Satan did, I didn't mind getting whomped by Jesus because he wasn't cheesing; it was just me zigging where I should have zagged.

But Jesus would have been a helluva lot worse if I hadn't waded through all those fighters before him; heck, I got the Eye of the Tiger just from fighting Satan alone. So I fought on, I learned all that Jesus could do, I anticipated it and I countered or avoided it. So in the end I beat Jesus with reaction time and tactics (which make me proud), not with counter-cheese (which makes me feel kind of cheap and filthy-dirty inside).

So Jesus is fallen! Excellent! So now it's Game Over and Thank You for Playing, I get treated to a snazzy endgame cinema and maybe that secret character back there gets unlocked, right?

...

I KNEW IT!!!

I knew it I knew it I knew it I sporking well knew it!

Looks like God Almighty's here to serve up an Old-Testament-style beatdown and a side of fries!